Imagine the houses in your hometown all have cardboard doors, or leave their doors wide open. Now imagine inside all those houses there are safes, jewellery cases, storage lockers and desk drawers all protected by locks made of paper. As you would expect, all of those houses and lockers and drawers would be easy pickings for professional burglars or even for unskilled thieves looking for something to pawn.

Now, imagine instead of stealing anything, the home invaders hid tiny devices inside all those poorly locked containers. Let's suppose those devices could make phone calls whenever and to wherever the invaders chose. Maybe the gizmos lay hidden in all those storage lockers and desk drawers, in all those homes, for years -- undetected and benign.